Failing to Engage Global Employees? Tap Virtual Town Halls

Submitted by: Ashley Speagle

Employee engagement is what creates brand advocates, a culture of openness and a dynamic workforce. It also keeps your corporate communications team up at night—especially if your employees are scattered across the world.

To keep up with your company’s global growth, you need better tools and techniques, like virtual town halls.

Losing out on Town Hall Engagement?

Nothing engages, inspires and motivates quite like good leadership. By putting your executives’ faces in front of employees, town halls foster trust and personal connections with those not sitting near the C-Suite.

Town halls open up the dialogue with employees, and, by including them in the decision-making process, employees feel valued and motivated by the bigger picture. They’re also a great place to fulfill employee recognition programs and show—not just tell—company values.

However, on a global scale, the costs and complicated logistics of travel and planning for these events can put a halt to town halls, but enterprises that skimp on employee engagement often find less success in their global expansion.

According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace study, global companies with successful employee engagement yield greater profits by about 22 percent. Setting up shop in an emerging market is an exciting opportunity for your company to experience new growth, but if your employee engagement overseas is lacking, then your company may find sustaining growth a challenge.

Close the Global Gap Virtually

Here are three ways that virtual town halls can solve your toughest challenges for cross-geographical corporate communications:

Challenge #1: Patting employees on the back when you can’t be there.

To really break into emerging markets, you want workers that positively influence customers and top talent in the local market, which means you need to reward and grow a base of brand advocates. Since you can’t be there to tell top contributors that they’re all getting extra time off for a big local event, and emails don’t truly suffice, you can use virtual town halls to deliver the message live.

Employee recognition remains a cost-effective alternative to pay raises in rewards strategies for global teams, and recognition from managers increases employee engagement by almost 60 percent, according to Officevibe’s infographic.

Websites and emails list but don’t embed company values, and your message isn’t the only thing that communicates them. By displaying your leaders’ behavior, body language and personalities in live, virtual town halls, you can truly show your company’s message.

Challenge #3: Cultivating open communication between leaders and employees they rarely see.

To open the dialogue, employees need regular face time, authentic conversations and opportunities to share. Virtual town halls are the platform they need to speak up so your leaders can fix problems and execute new ideas that impact productivity at work.

Today’s webinar and webcasting platforms make it easier than ever to deliver cost-efficient, smooth virtual events to thousands of attendees for corporate communications. You’ll see how easy it is to poll and survey employees immediately afterwards to gain valuable feedback and continue engagement, and the creative possibilities to make your events unique and fresh will have your brain firing on all cylinders (social elements, gamification and live streaming, oh my!).

In fact, once you get comfortable with virtual town halls, you can increase the frequency of your events with all of the time and money you’ll be saving on travel. Learn more about the benefits of the international virtual town hall in this case study from TalkPoint by PGi.